In just the past few hours the kooky notion of the deep state has come up more than once in political discussions. One would think the Assadist “progressives” (led by Glenn Greenwald) had discredited it & them enough by accusing those who oppose Trump of being in league with the deep state to incite a “soft coup” against him. Now today, one erstwhile FB friend suggested that the Honduran/Guatemalan caravan was organized by the deep state to effect the US elections to the advantage of the Republicans & the rightwing crowd is claiming the deep state is sending explosives to leading Democrats to thwart the Republicans in the elections. It cuts nuts both ways.
The notion of the deep state originated, as far as I have been able to determine, in conservative analyses of the Turkish government. During the mass protests in 2013 against the Erdogan regime, I spent many hours hunting down the meaning of the deep state in Turkey & concluded that it was basically an Islamophobic & orientalist explanation for the workings of the Turkish capitalist class within the Turkish government. Not fundamentally different than how the capitalist class operates within every government that it controls except under autocratic conditions in Turkey.
Because of lazy intellectual habits, both right & left-wing libertarians see everything in terms of intrigue & conspiracy & are incapable of rigorous analysis of social or political phenomena. In the case of this deep state rubbish, it’s just a paranoidal or Islamophobic end-run around addressing the question of capitalist control of governments & has no relevance whatsoever in the context of the 2018 US elections.
